Product Manager at Elective

Elective is a Vancouver-based Series A fintech that has built the industry's first "Learn Now, Pay Later" solution designed to help world-class course creators, coaches, and educators sell more effectively. To date, Elective has supported over 100,000 consumers across North America investing in their education, all underwritten, funded, and serviced by Elective.

The company has proven product-market fit with 8+ figures in revenue, more than doubling the business over the last 12 months, all profitably and without any dedicated sales or marketing spend. As the first Product Manager at the company, you won't be joining a product org to optimize it. You'll be building one from the ground up on top of a proven platform that has already served 100,000+ customers. The person in this role will partner directly with the CEO to shape product strategy, own end-to-end execution, and help drive the next phase of growth.

This is a foundational hire. You'll help define what product looks like at Elective. That means the cadence, the standards, and the operating system for how we build. The role grows as the function does, with a clear path to senior product leadership for the right builder.

What you'll be doing

• Translating company strategy into a sequenced roadmap. You'll partner with the CEO on direction and own how it ships: sequencing, scope, and tradeoffs. You'll maintain a rolling 3-6 month view, with the next 5 initiatives defined, the 5 after that shaped, and everything beyond that directional.
• Building the product operating system. Intake, prioritization, discovery, delivery, and review rituals that fit Elective's launch cadence. Tracking commitments and surfacing slippage early. Replacing tribal knowledge with documented systems, dashboards, and decision logs.
• Shaping projects engineers can build from independently. No ambiguity, no hand-waving. You define the what and why with enough clarity that one engineer ships the whole feature.
• Owning every tactical tradeoff. Scope vs. speed, feature vs. quality work, merchant ask vs. platform investment. You'll make the call and defend it. You escalate the few that genuinely need CEO involvement.
• Running our Voice of the Customer program. Regular merchant interviews and weekly reviews of customer feedback across tickets, sessions, and other channels. Synthesizing it into structured signal, not anecdotes.
• Defining and tracking KPIs for every initiative. Pulling your own analytics. Measuring outcomes, not outputs.
• Making go-to-market part of done. You'll build the documentation, internal guides, and change-management mechanics that get finance, customer care, risk, and compliance ready before launch, not after.
• Operating compliant by design. Every feature clears the bar of a regulated financial services business in the US and Canada.

What you bring

• 3-5+ years in product, or former founder experience with a track record of shipping a product end-to-end. Either profile works if you've owned execution at a small or growth-stage company.
• Systems thinking. You walk into a messy product org and map the underlying flow: how requests enter, how decisions get made, how work gets prioritized, how outcomes get measured. You design lightweight rituals and build decision logs so product memory survives turnover. This is the muscle that takes Elective from founder-led product to repeatable product machine.
• Methodical and organized. You set the operating cadence for the team and run it cleanly. You build repeatable mechanisms instead of one-off fixes.
• Sharp judgment on tradeoffs. You make the hard calls: what to cut, what to defer, what to say no to. You push back on scope creep and keep the team focused on the core. You can defend every call with clear rationale, not just instinct.
• Strong written communication. You can produce decision docs and PRDs that reduce meetings rather than create them.
• Discovery discipline. You've run user research that changed what got built.
• Self-sufficient with data. You pull your own analytics, define your own metrics, and design experiments without waiting for someone else to build the dashboard.
• Commercial instinct. You connect product decisions to the business model and understand what drives retention and expansion.
• Technical fluency. You don't hide behind "that's an engineering question." You understand systems well enough to push back on engineering trade-offs and have productive conversations about architecture.
• Operator mindset. You treat Customer Care, Risk, Finance, Compliance, and Engineering as customers of the product function, not obstacles to ship around.
• Hands-on with modern AI tools. You've formed opinions about how you work best with them and use them to prototype, communicate, and accelerate your output.
• Comfort in ambiguity. You ramp through doing, not through being taught. You bring the answer to the room, not the question.
• Domain experience in fintech, payroll, legal tech, or another regulated environment is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. Adaptability matters more.

Why Elective?

• Strong Traction: Our rapid growth means your work will directly impact thousands of customers.
• Impact: You'll get to shape the culture of Elective. The early team you build becomes the company you build, and your impact here will be immediate and lasting.
• Competitive Compensation: We reward exceptional work and want to attract the best talent.
• Laptop & Equipment: We'll make sure you're set up for success with a company-owned laptop and relevant accessories.
• Learning & Development Stipend: An annual $1,000 budget for courses, books, conferences, seminars, and more.
• Extended Health Care Benefits: Comprehensive health, vision, and dental coverage for you, plus an additional wellness spending account.

This is a hybrid, full-time role based in our downtown Vancouver office. You'll be required to work on-site three days per week.

Elective is committed to paying our team fairly and clearly. Above all, we pay for growth. The estimated salary range for this role is $120,000 to $140,000. Your specific salary will be determined based on your job-related skills, knowledge, experience, and our internal assessment. It's possible to join Elective at a salary above or below this range. This range does not include benefits or the performance bonus, which typically runs up to 10% of salary. You'll continue to have conversations about your career development with your manager, and you'll see your compensation grow over time as you grow with us.